@bjb But does a local bylaw limit the number of colours the shop can sell to a pre-approved list?
Also, can you be cited for knitting on your front porch? (That's assuming that front porches aren't a violation in themselves of course. It's been a while, I can't remember if that's the case or not.)
@alan
Hmm, I guess this is making fun of Kanata (suburb of Ottawa) and their bylaws? (I have heard of Kanata bylaws about colours of doors on homes, garages.) What's the story about front porches?
I chose the LYS in Kanata to talk about today because they are open Sunday.
There is another one in Ottawa that is on my list but thay're not open Sunday. I'll give it to you today as well:
@bjb Yup. There's all sorts of weird bylaws. The knitting on porch reference relates to one that prohibits people from repairing their cars in their driveway.
Then I thought... I haven't seen any front porches, maybe they're outlawed too!
@bjb@alan I've been there. (Wool-Tyme) It's right across from Nita Beer (Craft brewer) and across from the pishop.ca 😀 So you could get wool, pi shop and beer in one trip!
@Dianora@bjb I get the feeling that our paths have crossed on more than one occasion, especially considering that I started in Physics at Carleton... At BNR I worked on Telidon, data acquisition for the RD4A radios, the new Payphone, at Nortel SCSI drivers for a part of the SL-1. One of those Hyperions did telephone cost accounting for CJOH... and so on.
@alan@bjb Oh yes, I knew someone who worked at Norpak.
I'm at heart a real-time/embedded systems type. Need a device driver? An OS ported? An entire OS written (I did a mini 6502 DOS years ago)
Oh a Hyperion doing telephone cost accounting!? Wow. I still have a Hyperion bag but no Hyperion!
@Dianora@bjb It's been a long time since I've done a lot of embedded work. We had an external buffer on the cost accounting system because the switch was bursty. The hyperion just read it as fast as it could. for the RD4A we were capturing bit error rates and all sorts of other stuff. The XMS only supported flat files, so I wrote an entire hierarchical filesystem for it. And the payphone is a story best told over beer /2
@Dianora@bjb The tech part was an event-driven message passing OS for a Z-80 architecture processor, and a table driven FSM at the front for the logic. All written in <2 months. Not to mention a little last minute hardware debugging (the HW engineer was a digital guy, I learned electronics in my basement) 2AM before final demo and a few wires from VCC and ground across to the other side of the breadboard, and suddenly things worked right .
@alan@bjb HAH I did similar for a 6809 system. I loved 6809 asm. I did a lot of x86 optimising the BASICA graphics too.
As far as Hardware goes, yes I debugged a 68K system using a logic analyser once.
I'm also a ham radio operator.. I remember at one company our engineer was trying to suppress a spur for FCC acceptance. He had us all shut down computers so I wandered over pointed at the SA and told him it was a great picture of Global. Complete with the FM subcarrier, colour burst... Should have been using a Faraday cage eh?
@Dianora@bjb yeah 6809 stands as my favourite 8-bit chip by far. The Mitel gig was for an IC tester, interactive commands and compiler for the thing running in 16KB on a 6802 under the team's "spaghetti OS". Re-used some of the concepts in that thing many times over.
@alan@bjb The 6805 and Hitachi CMOS versions had the double AB = D register I can't remember if the 6802 had that. Pretty amazing the 6809 was random logic..
Oh yes the spaghetti code team. goto should be ripped out completely. A goto is a sign of bad design IMHO.
@Dianora@bjb Their OS like thing was in "anything to save a single byte" mode. It was horrid. I always wanted to live in the alternate universe where the IBM PC was based on a 6809 instead.
@Dianora I'm not sure who screwed up at Motorola, probably some marketer who figured it would attract a premium price, but man if they had priced it a little lower, it would have won so many designs and probably dominated. It was a joy to code for. And yeah the 68008 must have been the brain child of someone they hired from Intel.
@alan@bjb Was that read via the serial port or via parallel port? The Z8530 was an interesting choice but unfortunately screwed us over when people wanted serial programs and none of the IBM programs would work..
@Dianora@bjb Seqial. Used Ctrl-S and Crtl-Q to the buffer box to manage flow. It was a last minute solution when we realized the Hyperion couldn't keep up!
@alan@bjb I wrote an interrupt driven serial port driver for the Hyperion. Apple used the same chip to do AppleTalk but they transmitted using polling to get the speeds up. PC IRQ was horrible.
Add comment